Highlights from the world of Enterprise Software and Solutions over the past few weeks:

Workday Rising

Workday opens up to a huge, successful IPO ($WDAY) reestablishing the enterprise software and solutions market as an attractive investment space.

Microsoft gears up to launch Windows 8. Upgrade to Windows 8 for $70. Upgrade to iOS6 and Android Jellybean 4.1 for $0.

Google set to face antitrust actions because such actions have been so much more effective than the market moving along – just ask Microsoft!

Applereleases iPhone 5. I got one, and I am underwhelmed. No home screen widgets, no Swype for typing, bad maps, inaccurate voice recognition, and very expensive accessories. Compared to Android 4.1 Jellybean, with excellent new features and real choice in devices. I think we may just have reached the Windows 3.1 vs. MacOS inflection point in this market …

But to keen observers, the search supremacy that Google has enjoyed is already starting to erode. While PC searches are still important, the next big market is divided into specific vertical searches, which provide substantially more depth than what Google has to offer (that category includes the likes of duckduckgo, kayak, and Yelp) and mobile searches, which is still a relatively green field and is far from being dominated by Google.

Duffield and Bhusri have done an amazing job building Workday to where it is today, and investors are betting the best is yet to come for the company. Entrepreneurs should learn from Workday’s success.

Actually, both vendors have improved a lot since last year — so I also gave one point to the vendor whose 2012 event showed the most improvement compared with its 2011 event. Here are the criteria and the scores:

In a related issue, the FTC is looking at Google’s handling of valuable patents, which are determined to be essential to smartphones. The agency is trying to determine if they are licensed fairly and whether patent infringement lawsuits are used to hamper innovation.

The largest set of features goes by the development code-name “SolrCloud” and involves bringing easy scalability to Solr. See http://wiki.apache.org/solr/SolrCloud for more details. * Distributed indexing designed from the ground up for near real-time (NRT) and NoSQL features such as realtime-get, optimistic locking, and durable updates. * High availability with no single points of failure. * Apache Zookeeper integration for distributed coordination and cluster metadata and configuration storage. * Immunity to split-brain issues due to Zookeeper’s Paxos distributed consensus protocols. * Updates sent to any node in the cluster and are automatically forwarded to the correct shard and replicated to multiple nodes for redundancy. * Queries sent to any node automatically perform a full distributed search across the cluster with load balancing and fail-over. * A collection management API. * Smart SolrJ client (CloudSolrServer) that knows to send documents only to the shard leaders Solr 4.0

Duffield has been called the tech industry’s Jerry Garcia: An avuncular type prone to wearing Hawaiian shirts and signing corporate memos with his initials, DAD. He was known to join PeopleSoft employees at beer bashes and once jumped out of a cake at a trade show. He didn’t just encourage folks to bring their dogs to work; he set up a $100 million foundation to spare stray animals from being euthanized.

With the stock at $47.91, Workday’s cofounder and co-CEO’s stake is worth more than $3.36 billion, a figure that may rise if the stock performs well on its first day of trading. The 72-year-old Duffield, who was worth $2.1 billion as of last month’s publication of The Forbes 400, is now worth an estimated $4.5 billion.

Oracle disclosed in a Sept. 21 filing that Ellison had pledged 139 million Oracle shares, valued at $4.3 billion as of Thursday, as “collateral to secure personal indebtedness”. Ellison’s plans for that money are not known, but he told CNBC that he secured the credit “just in case I go shopping and something catches my eye”.

it’s just that it is rare to find an executive willing to give his company a grade of “C” on technology innovation (although he quickly assured the audience it was moving toward “B+” and eventually an “A”). He gave SAP a “B” on cloud and an “A” on big data.

Workday’s strong debut also seemed to help the shares of other cloud-software vendors, including rival Oracle, which was up 1.3% on Friday morning, and SAP SAP +1.18% , which was up 1.5%. Citrix CTXS -0.67% was up more than 2% earlier before moderating its gains.

The Pleasanton-based successor to PeopleSoft sold nearly 28 million shares Thursday for $28 apiece — higher than the company had indicated just two days before — putting at least $637 million in the company’s coffers and establishing an initial valuation of about $4.5 billion.

The stock debuted on the New York Stock Exchange at $48.05 Friday morning, slightly after 7 a.m. Pacific time, under the ticker symbol WDAY. In the first two hours of trading, the price stayed near the elevated debut level, trading in a range between $45.05 and $49.23 — 60.9 percent to 75.8 percent higher than the IPO price.

According to BNP Paribas analyst Alexander Peterc, who points out 20 different information and service providers, including TomTom, are involved in Apple Maps, the problems appear mostly to do with points of interest, or POIs, which include things like restaurants or shops and are not part of the cartography supplied by TomTom.

ADP, meanwhile, has been delivering human-resources services for decades, with more than $10 billion in revenue and 600,000 customers mostly through its payroll processing services. The company has three HCM application offerings: ADP Workforce Now for companies with fewer than 1,000 employees, Vantage HCM for organizations with more than 1,000 employees, and GlobalView for multinational organizations. These services are used by more than 30,000 companies, according to ADP.

Office for iPad actually existed and that it was going to be released in November 10 as “Office Mobile”. It looks like it’s finally been confirmed, though, by the company itself.

The press release states that Office 2013 will be made available to businesses starting in December, and consumers will be able to grab it towards the end of February. Microsoft says that “Office 365 services and other Office products for mobile (phones and tablets) will be released from March 2013.”

A Microsoft spokesperson from the US has neither confirmed or denied the availability of Office 2013 on mobile devices starting next year, only stating that the company hasn’t announced it yet. The spokesperson continues by stating, “We have said previously Office Mobile will work across Windows Phones, Android phones and iOS.”

The PureData System lineup will clearly go head to head with Exadata first and Microsoft appliances and analytic alternatives from the likes of Teradata, EMC (Greenplum), and HP (Vertica) second.

IBM’s new system includes three distinct offerings: PureData System for Transactions, PureData System for Analytics, and the PureData System for Operational Analytics. Each offering includes entry-level configurations that can be scaled up on IBM servers running industry standard X86 Intel chips. The system for Transactions is also available based on IBM Power servers running AIX, IBM’s flavor of the Unix operating system.

Passerini talked further about the need to pull in point-of-sale data, market data, consumer relevance data, and simulation data, and to bring it all together in a way that could deliver new meaning in a more predictive way. “I believe there is nothing more important for us than to be able to predict when we launch a new initiative, a new brand, a new product, a new packaging.” And here’s the really important part: “We haven’t cracked this nut yet. I believe this is the next stage of breakthrough opportunity.”

What investors didn’t see until a month after the IPO were the letters that pushed Facebook to disclose in detail such key financial challenges as decelerating revenue growth, user count and its dependence on gaming company Zynga Inc. — all issues that arose in prominence after it became a public company.

Publishing the SEC letters beforehand would be “a better way to get the information to the market than an amended filing,” said Peter Henning, a former SEC lawyer who teaches at Wayne State University in Detroit. “The SEC is a better soap box than the filings.”

“The institutions are coming in with monstrous orders and are willing to pay more than the prevailing price range. They want the deal very badly,” Sweet told Bloomberg News.

The company has yet to turn a profit but shows the revenue growth that investors crave in an IPO, with overall revenues rising from $25.2 million to $68.1 million to $134.4 million in the last three full fiscal years. In the first six months of the 2012 fiscal year, that growth continued with revenues of $119.5 million, though losses totaled $47.3 million.

To deliver a 360-degree customer view to their business teams OppenheimerFunds retired its legacy CRM application and rolled out Salesforce to their Institutional, Retail and Marketing lines of business. To be successful, more than 525 employees need to successfully adopt Salesforce by the end of 2013.

Ashish and his team knew that they would lay the foundation for successful Salesforce adoption by delivering trusted and complete customer information on an ongoing basis. The team crafted a master data management (MDM) strategy. Customer information would be consolidated from different systems (which was in different formats) to create the “best version of the truth” and shared across the enterprise, including real-time integration with Salesforce.

SAP also ran a full page ad in The Wall Street Journal (pictured) that says: “Apparently, Oracle Needs to Fact-Check Their Fact-Checkers.”

Some think this latest spat between SAP and Oracle is a waste of time, makes SAP look bad and/or doesn’t offer any real value to customers. Some went so far as to suggest that boundaries were crossed because the OOW Twitter stream was (gasp!) “hijacked.”

1. Test for Core App Quality..
2. Optimize your layouts for larger screens..
3. Take advantage of extra screen area available on tablets..
4. Use Icons and other assets that are designed for tablet screens..
5. Adjust font sizes and touch targets for tablet screens..
6. Adjust sizes of home screen widgets for tablet screens..
7. Offer the app’s full feature set to tablet users..
8. Don’t require hardware features that might not be available on tablets..
9. Declare support for tablet screen configurations..
10. Follow best practices for publishing in Google Play

Social CRM is based on the simple premise that you are able to interact with your customers based on their needs, not your rules. It is an extension of CRM, not a replacement, and among the important benefits is that it adds value back to the users and customers.

An average patent lawsuit costs between $900,000 to $6,000,000 to defend. In the last month and a half alone, Twitter has received three new patent troll lawsuits. The law currently does not allow us to recover the millions of dollars in fees we spent to defend ourselves — nor does it compensate us for the time spent by many Twitter employees who worked on the case. The law only allows us to ask for certain types of minor fees, which is why the court was only able to order this particular patent troll to pay us $10,447.85.

U.S. patent law confers a monopoly (in the sense of a right to exclude competitors), generally for 20 years, on an invention that is patented, provided the patent is valid — that is, that it is genuinely novel, useful, and not obvious.
[Wait – are you saying that a rectangular phone shape with rounded corners is genuinely novel or not obvious??? -DBM]

Complete View of Customer Interactions
The complete view expands the previous two levels with data on customer interactions and
transactions, such as support activity, payment status, billings or subscriptions, or warranty and
registration. It can illustrate customer activity by channel (e.g., on-line or call center) and reflect
customer activity on social media related to a company (e.g., writing reviews or commenting on
blogs), if that data is tracked by an application.

The reality of Social CRM is that many enterprises aren’t finding what they need with existing vendors. So they are quietly building their own CRM systems. It’s all about using technology to support and streamline relationships not control them.

[For real goodwill, should offer it on @United! -DBM]
The service went live on Monday in six Manhattan subway stations and several San Francisco destinations, including Union Square, Fisherman’s Wharf and Nob Hill. Starting November, Microsoft will expand the service to 200 Manhattan locations.

But don’t expect free Wi-Fi without some strings attached. When users access the Microsoft and Boingo Wi-Fi, they’ll be directed to the new Windows Store (the Windows 8 take on Apple’s App Store or Google Play). Microsoft says it is making free Wi-Fi available in San Francisco and New York City specifically because “amazing apps are being built in New York and San Francisco, and we want to give talented developers the chance to launch their businesses through the Windows Store.”

Join the “godfather of MDM” Aaron Zornes and Informatica MDM expert Ravi Shankar who will share the 10 key questions to ask before you select an MDM approach. One question they’ll be discussing is “How important is the ability to manage complex relationships and hierarchies to our business?”. These questions are based on the best practices gathered from more than 200 customer implementations. Increase your chances of becoming one of the hundreds of companies to successfully implement MDM by using the right approach for your business.

In a ruling handed down in late May, Judge Alsup agreed with Google. He wrote that copyright law does not give the copyright holder control over all the ways to implement a function or specification. “The [Copyright] Act confers ownership only over the specific way in which the author wrote out his version,” he wrote. “Others are free to write their own implementation to accomplish the identical function, for, importantly, ideas, concepts and functions cannot be monopolized by copyright.”

Some component suppliers to Apple in Asia say they have received orders to make more than 10 million units of the smaller tablets in the fourth quarter. That is roughly double the order that were placed for Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets in the same quarter, these suppliers say.

It has only 600 customers for HANA. For a product which its leadership has been talking about for years, to only show the equivalent of 0.5% penetration of its customer base is the equivalent of a scenario where Tim Cook reports in 2015 that the iPhone 5 has sold only a few thousand units.

If I were SAP, I would be much more worried:

That Oracle is poised to build out the most elaborate cloud infrastructure in enterprise tech, which will make SAP’s data center investments around BYD and SuccessFactors look miniscule.
That Oracle’s social and customer experience applications position it much better as the market pivots toward revenue focused IT, whereas SAP continues to be focused on control and compliance IT
That the names Salesforce, Workday and NetSuite came up many, many more times during OOW than SAP’.

The veteran crew, led by skipper Jimmy Spithill, overcame a spectacular capsize in Fleet Race 5 and later won the Match Racing Championship of the event sailed on San Francisco Bay. The U.S. Coast Guard estimated the spectator fleet at 1,000 vessels, while tens of thousands of people lined the shore.

Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), the world’s largest online retailer, agreed to buy its 11-building headquarters complex in Seattle for $1.16 billion in a deal poised to be the biggest U.S. office transaction of the year.

Two-Tier ERP for Oracle is part of the NetSuite OneWorld ERP suite and also includes SuiteCloud Connectors to Oracle that are delivered by a number of independent software vendors (ISVs) and system integrators (SIs), such as IBM Cast Iron, Informatica, Dell Boomi, Pervasive Software and Celigo, NetSuite officials said.

“[In] the reality I live in,” said Lucas, “we shipped a 100TB HANA system.” Lucas noted that SAP’s in-memory system when compared with Oracle’s offering is “substantially larger.”

For Lucas, Ellison’s claims during the keynote, were “baseless” and the result of a lack of innovation from Oracle. “Where is the breakthrough besides a faster I/O card?”

“My core issue is that what was behind the statement is more hardware, very little substance when it comes to true software innovation.” Lucas referred to Sun Microsystems, which was acquired by Oracle in 2010, as an “albatross around Oracle’s neck.”

The bottom line is that OOW is a sales event, plain and simple. There is a secondary purpose relating to information and knowledge transfer, in the form of keynotes and overbooked sessions, but that’s really secondary. The goal is to pitch as much product to as many customers and to do it as efficiently as possible. (Efficiently for Oracle, not necessarily for customers and prospects). And Larry forbid, no real give and take, discourse, or critical discussion about product and market strategy should be allowed to take place.

But now, we’ve moved on from just searching for data. It becomes a monitoring system, it’s real-time analytics, it’s this data fabric, where we’re feeding data in, and it’s a development platform. So, we’ve been working hard to describe the category and the outcome. What do customers get when they ingest their machine data and analyze it?

And that is that healthcare leaders need to develop very broad strategies, comprehensive strategies, that bring everything together—the EHRs, the eMARs, the data warehouses and report-writing systems, the vendor-neutral diagnostic image archives, the clinical decision support-based alert systems, the population health tools, the care management and care coordination support systems, the health information exchanges, and on and on—everything—in order to make the next leap in overall care delivery and effectiveness performance.

The cheers from the developer keynotes told me more about the prospects for the company than anything else. Developers are indeed the new kingmakers and Salesforce has shown itself adept at courting these critical influencers.

No one else has this capability, and thanks to the newly awarded patent, it is likely to stay that way. Also, keep in mind that SEO candidates are FREE, unlike candidates that come from job boards, PPC campaigns, or most other paid sources. These job listings can cost the company money for each post or each time they are clicked.

Oracle is two steps away from winning by far and away the most important part of the case: the API copyright liability part. In order to prevail on the API copyright liability part, Java API copyrightability is an issue on which Oracle absolutely must prevail at the Federal Circuit or, possibly, at the Supreme Court if the highest court agrees to look at this matter (if Oracle wins at the Federal Circuit, Google will appeal to the Supreme Court, and vice versa, and the issue might be important enough for the Supreme Court to grant certiorari).

Oracle is still somewhat of a niche player in data center circles. It has a smallish data center in Austin, and a much bigger one in Salt Lake City which has taken years to roll out. It is deploying others in the UK, Netherlands and Australia, but will need to continue to add global capacity. That should translate to a significant spike in capex (like Microsoft had as it built out its Azure infrastructure). And in more credit for design, cooling, power usage, energy sourcing and other data center innovations that we mostly credit these days to Google and Amazon.

The other major impact of the Oracle cloud will be as version 12c – its multi-tenant database – rolls out. Thomas Kurian says a few SaaS vendors are already beta customers. I presume they are recent startups. The real impact will be if established SaaS vendors like NetSuite, Workday and Salesforce.com migrate their proprietary multi-tenancy in their application layer to the database layer.

This is a huge change in Oracle’s business model, and the company is taking the transformation very seriously. Every major product is being transformed by the cloud, including the way the sales force operates. Oracle sees this transition as its next major growth opportunity – telling analysts that organic growth will come from integration and redeployment of products in this new way.

With its plans for a proprietary cloud along with its encouragement of customers to use its software on its engineered systems, the database giant is looking more and more like it wants to become the Apple of the enterprise.

This week, Spithill has been talking of having a third Oracle skipper on the podium as well. Ben Ainslie, the British Olympic gold medalist who is at the helm of J.P. Morgan BAR, is sailing independently now, but he is a big part of Oracle’s preparation effort for next summer’s main event.

In summary, I’m excited about Windows 8 and am confident that existing Windows users will feel the same after they have had a chance to use it. Below are a few additional thoughts on the new operating system. I used green text to indicate tips from my own experience that you might find particularly useful.

Samsung’s share remains flat, compared with a significant growth for Apple. Interestingly, the figures close before the iPhone 5 was released — let alone announced — showing an increase in iPhone uptake ahead of the expected next-generation Apple smartphone.

Ellison’s ambitions include converting sea water into fresh water on the 141-square-mile island of Lanai. He also wants to see more electric cars on the island located near Maui, and hopes to increase its fruit exports to Japan and other markets.

AMD corporate fellow Phil Rogers took the stage to, among other things, announce Project Sumatra, a joint effort by his company and Oracle to build native support for Java in programs using Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to improve performance. The project is a reaction, he said, to the evolution from multi-core CPUs to CPU+GPU combinations that use “a single piece of silicon and shared memory.”

Allen also points out some less-than-intuitive elements. For example, the Charms bar – which includes a number of important tools such as search, start, settings, and devices – has no visual cues to inform the user how to display it. A similar absence of visual cues exists in apps that run under “Windows 8 style,” formerly known as Metro. While Allen finds closing a program on a tablet to be intuitive, doing so on a desktop is less so. To close a program on a desktop, the user must move their cursor to the top of the screen, wait for it to turn into a hand, and then use it to drag the application window to the bottom of the screen.

Meg Whitman, Hewlett-Packard’s chief executive, beat up her company on Wednesday.

Ms. Whitman told a meeting of Wall Street analysts that they should expect sharply lower revenue and profits. She also told them not to expect the company to fully right itself before 2016. “We have much more work to do,” she said.

The majority of the people that use todays “workforce” technology is the workforce. It is important to ask yourself, are you buying technology and adopting new processes for the HR function or are you trying to engage the workforce. The answer to this question tells you which aisle to go down in the grocery store.

Through its partnership with Datalogix, Facebook says it can now give brand marketers data on the actual in-store sales that their ad campaigns on Facebook have generated – a more useful piece of feedback than total clicks. Datalogix tracks the relationship between ads on Facebook and real-world spending by compiling consumer purchasing information from retail stores and matching it with data about Facebook ad impressions.

Oracle has found a market for its big, pricey engineered hardware systems — and it’s in new public and private Oracle clouds. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison laid out the company’s new all-red infrastructure-as-a-service cloud plan at Oracle OpenWorld on Sunday night.

Cloud delivered MDM is here to stay. The technology has always been valuable, but when leverage using a cloud-delivered model, the technology becomes more than compelling. I suspect that this will drive more MDM adoptions, and better data as a result.

[I’ve heard some dubious stories in my career – & this is one of them. Al Gore invented the Internet, and Larry Ellison invented the Cloud. Mm-Hmm. -DBM]
Salesforce.com & NetSuite were effectively founded as a result of a single 1998 conversation involving…Larry Ellison,Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff & Evan Goldberg,NetSuite’s…CTO…Ellison asked him what he wanted to do next. His answer,as Nelson told me by phone yesterday,was a software company like Siebel Systems,but one that delivered a customer relationship application via the Internet’s pipes,w/o having to be installed on a local machine.

Ellison said it was a fine idea, but that there was a greater need for a company that delivered software in the same way but was used to manage the business. Goldberg took that idea and created what was initially called NetLedger, and is now NetSuite. Benioff called Ellison back two weeks later and said he was going to start the Siebel-like company that Goldberg had initially envisioned.

“You may have to connect up that application in the cloud to another application in the cloud from another supplier or an application you have on-premise. You need to consider not only the application you’re buying but the platform on which it rests.”
“Standards are still important. Just because we’re in the cloud doesn’t mean we forget about standards and make everything proprietary again.”
“Just because the application is in the cloud doesn’t mean you have to do any work. You’re still going to have to interconnect these applications.”

Pricing for the database service…starts at US$175 per month for one schema, 5GB of disk storage and 30GB of data transfer. A midtier option costs $900 per month with one schema, 20GB of storage and 120GB of data transfer.

For $2,000 per month, developers get 50GB of storage and 300GB of data transfer, but still only one schema.

The Java service…starting at $249 per month for a single WebLogic server and rising up to $1,499 for four servers, with storage and data transfer amounts also rising accordingly.
…human resources starts at $9.50 per employee per month and talent management begins at $1.50 per user per month.

Sales and marketing starts at $100 per user per month…with enterprise and premium editions available for $140 and $200 per user per month, respectively.

Oracle’s site also includes pricing for its cloud customer service and support software, acquired through the acquisition of RightNow. Seat pricing ranges from $90 to $250 across four editions.

“We have all the assets we need to blow through 2 billion euros ($2.6 billion) by 2015,” Bill McDermott said in a phone interview today. “The way we’re growing in the cloud, hopefully we can even get it done sooner.”

Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, speaks to CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo about dividends and the homes he owns around the world that he converts into art museums. “You will see a gradual increase in dividends, nothing dramatic,” he says.

The linchpin of Oracle’s cloud strategy revolves around private cloud architecture and allowing you to change your mind, said Hurd. If a customer has security concerns, run Oracle’s cloud architecture behind the firewall. “You can mix and match clouds,” said Hurd.

My take: Oracle argues that its mixed cloud approach with standard configurations is a big deal. It is for the enterprise customer. The reality is corporations will have public, private and on-premise applications. If Oracle can make toggling between those delivery models seamlessly it will have a strong business tech case.

Core building blocks—applications and database—for engineered systems are strong and that plays into Exa- lineup returns.

My take:Hurd has a case here too based on performance gains and Oracle workloads. The looming concern with integrated systems will be lock-in and whether you want Oracle’s hardware when you spend a ton on its software.
markhurd200Mark Hurd Credit: Dan Farber

Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, speaks to CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo about his company’s plans for the Cloud, and where the computer industry is headed. “We completed a 7-year rewrite of all of our applications for the Cloud,” he says.

WE ANNOUNCED THE CLOUD IN JUNE. WE’VE BEEN WORKING REALLY ON CLOUD APPLICATIONS, THE COMPANY HAS FOR MULTIPLE YEARS. I THINK WE MADE SOME EXCITING ANNOUNCEMENTS LAST NIGHT IN THE CONTEXT OF BEING ABLE TO DO THINGS WITH THE CLOUD, BOTH OF WHAT YOU THINK OF AS THE ORACLE CLOUD BUT ALSO PRIVATE CLOUDS FOR CUSTOMERS LAST NIGHT THAT ARE PRETTY EXCITING. BUT I WOULDN’T CALL IT REPOSITIONING. I WOULD CALL IT A CONTINUATION OF A LOT OF WORK THE COMPANY HAS BEEN DOING FOR A LONG TIME TO GET READY FOR THIS.

In a surprise move, Better Place has ousted chief executive Shai Agassi, the charismatic founder of the electric car infrastructure company that has raised more than $1 billion to build a network of battery switching stations in Israel, Denmark, Australia and other countries.

“Unfortunately, it has become clear there is a conflict of interest and what could have been an insightful industry blog now appears to be little more than a mouthpiece for companies he has a financial relationship with.”

The two-thousand-and-counting number is far from Moorhead’s 5,000, and includes a large number of “filler” apps that don’t meet his definition of high quality. That, along with Ballmer’s continuing recruitment of developers, makes Microsoft’s strategy clear.

“They’re thinking long-term,” said Moorhead. “Microsoft and their partners are taking a long-term view of this. What’s important [to them] is getting Windows into mobility. They’re not too concerned about making that first impression [at launch].”

“We’re making this available only on Windows 8 machines running IE 10 so that we can showcase all the power of this new platform in support of the company’s launch,” said Bob Visse, general manager of MSN, in prepared remarks.

Only Apple Inc., the world’s most valuable company at $632.9 billion, tops Google among technology businesses. Apple passed Microsoft in 2010 on rising sales of iPhones and iPads — devices that helped usher in a new era of computing that’s less reliant on PCs.

The company now says it will offer 22,750,000 Class A shares at a price of between $21 and $24 a share. At the midpoint of that range, it should raise about $512 million, at a valuation of about $3.6 billion. It also said it will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol WDAY.

The company’s addition to its Exadata line of servers, called the X3, will be able to house as much as 22 terabytes of flash computer memory and four terabytes of DRAM in a single server rack to greatly speed up business reports. That’s four times as much flash storage per rack than a previous version of Exadata, Ellison said.

“If you thought the old Exadatas were fast, you ain’t seen nothing yet,” said Ellison, wearing a suit and black turtleneck and standing before eight giant screens bearing his slides.

In the broadest sense, the market for business software is a tale of two centuries, as Salesforce, NetSuite and other new companies are capturing a larger share of the growth from more-established rivals such as Oracle Corp., Microsoft Corp. and International Business Machines Corp.

The list includes AdSense for Feeds, Classic Plus, Spreadsheet Gadgets, Places for Android, and +1 Reports in Webmaster Tools. The company also plans to merge its Picasa photo service with Google Drive, which means you’ll have 5GB for both Picasa photos and Drive items.

“And later there was a follow-up memo among themselves, these executives, and in black and white it says: we elect to not pass this information down to the divisions that were actually involved in the design.

“So, from the sake of the engineers they went merrily along continuing their design not given any orders to back away.

“He’s kind of like the last of the Mohicans,” said Richard Davis, an analyst with investment bank Canaccord Genuity, noting that Ellison is one of the few original Silicon Valley entrepreneurs still running the firms they founded. “He relishes a challenge. I think he’s the happiest when the sabers are crossing.”

Apple’s response begins: “Continuing the attack on the jury and the jury process that Samsung has waged in the press worldwide, Samsung has filed a motion for a new trial based on alleged juror misconduct. Samsung seeks to seal the arguments and certain supporting declarations and exhibits concerning the alleged misconduct, citing concern for the jurors’ privacy and the integrity of the proceedings. But Samsung’s actions belie its words, as it has publicly filed documents that reveal the very facts that it seeks to seal. As a result, the media were quickly able to discern not only that Samsung had accused the jury of misconduct but also which juror it accused.”

Apple further called Samsung’s jury misconduct allegations “baseless” and “frivolous.”

“Among other failings, Samsung’s motion does not even address, let alone disclose, when Samsung learned the facts on which it bases its misconduct allegations, and in particular, whether Samsung impermissibly delayed raising this issue, as t

But the stipulation under the law is for the prior art to be sufficient to negate or invalidate Apple’s patents in this case, it had to be sufficiently similar or, more importantly, it had to be interchangeable.

And in example after example, when we put it to the test, the older prior art was just that. Not that there’s anything with older prior art – but the key was that the hardware was different, the software was an entirely different methodology, and the more modern software could not be loaded onto the older example and be run without error.

The initial verdict appeared to have been prepared hastily: the jury decided that Samsung was liable for damages even for patents that were not infringed, then amended its verdict about an hour later at the judge’s request.

“I think it’s going to be a little tough” to overturn the verdict because of allegations of jury misconduct, says Brian Love, a law professor at Santa Clara University who’s followed the trial closely. “You’re looking for material or something else coming in that wasn’t introduced at trial, a juror reading reports about the case and they’re being influenced by outside forces.”

But from a close examination of the statute and cases Samsung cited in the redacted section, we’ve discerned Samsung’s two-pronged argument for juror misconduct: The nine-person jury improperly considered extraneous evidence during deliberations and jury foreman Velvin Hogan failed to disclose in voir dire that he was involved in 1993 litigation with a former employer that led him and his wife to declare personal bankruptcy.

The five-day affair kicks off Sunday evening with the first of two keynote addresses by Oracle Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison, who is expected to introduce the company’s first version of its new 12c database (the “c” stands for cloud, of course). It is the company’s first major revamp of its core database business in several years.

In honor of Dreamforce 2012′s theme, we created a parody to the song “Otherside” — by none other than the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Like Dreamforce itself, we hope it both educates and entertains, inspiring brands to embrace the concept of the social enterprise.

While we’re improving Maps, you can try alternatives by downloading map apps from the App Store like Bing, MapQuest and Waze, or use Google or Nokia maps by going to their websites and creating an icon on your home screen to their web app.

Google has announced via its support page and Gmail blog that it is now rolling out support for CardDAV to make it simple for users to keep their contacts and calendar information stored in Googles’ cloud synchronized.

“INFA believes that Big Data is the confluence of three technology trends: big transaction data, big interaction data, and big data processing.,” he writes. “Unfortunately, the company is now experiencing weaker trends in Europe than many other technology companies, and it had not executed well in the U.S. … However, this has led to a valuation more in line with its peers (versus the traditional premium). Plus, we believe that the company is addressing its sales execution issues and believe that they should mostly be resolved by the end of this year. In addition, we do not believe that its recent issues were competitive. Therefore, we recommend purchase and believe that investors can be entering this quality name at an attractive entry point.”

Smith said companies could pay $10,000 for each of the additional 20,000 H-1B visa reserved for STEM occupations. Large employers now pay $1,500 apiece, along with several thousand dollars more in various fees. For green cards, the fee would be $15,000.

Altogether, Smith said, the fees would bring in $500 million a year.

Microsoft also detailed how that money might be spent. It called for hiring and training more STEM teachers for kindergarten through 12th grade and making advanced-placement computer-science courses available in 95 percent of U.S. high schools that lack them, among other things. It also said colleges should expand their enrollment capacity for STEM applicants, particularly in computer sciences.

Smith called the new $10,000 fee for an H-1B visa a small one-time investment.

We do that in full confidence that we are sticking in our goals, which is $2 billion in revenue, in the cloud are by 2015, including acquisitions, and to have profitability in the cloud business.

SuccessFactors had 3,500 customers [when we acquired them], only 120 were SAP customers. Just imagine having more than 200,000 customers at SAP what the leverage is [to acquire new SuccessFactors customers]. You don’t have the same cost of sales. Its just another example where 1+1 = 3.

At its OpenWorld conference in San Francisco on Sept. 30, Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison will show the new 12c database, designed for cloud computing, and more powerful systems to handle ballooning amounts of corporate data more efficiently, Mark Hurd, co-president at Oracle, said in an interview yesterday.

Microsoft is going to display Klout data — including a person’s Klout score and topics they are “influential” about — on the new Bing Sidebar pane for those users who can and want to see this information. And on Klout, “highlights from Bing will begin surfacing in the ‘moments’ section of some people’s Klout profiles,” a Microsoft spokesperson said.

This new partnership is related to Microsoft’s ongoing work to integrate social-search results into its Bing search engine via the sidebar panel, the same way that it does with Quora and foursquare.

This is an alliance based on a shared belief that people are at the center of task completion. To help you find the right person we need to determine who is influential and trusted on different topics on the web. Bing and Klout share this vision. In addition to the technical partnership described below, we are announcing that we are making a strategic investment in Klout.

Research in Motion reported a second quarter loss of $235 million, or 45 cents a share, compared to earnings of $329 million, or 63 cents a year ago. Revenue for the second quarter was $2.9 billion, down 32 percent from a year ago.
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Wall Street expected RIM to report a second quarter loss of 46 cents a share on revenue of $2.5 billion.

Once a business figures out how to solve its customers’ problems, organizational structures and processes emerge to guide the company towards efficient operation. Seasoned managers steer their employees from pursuing the art of discovery and towards engaging in the science of delivery. Employees are taught to seek efficiencies, leverage existing assets and distribution channels, and listen to (and appease) their best customers.

Once a business figures out how to solve its customers’ problems, organizational structures and processes emerge to guide the company towards efficient operation. Seasoned managers steer their employees from pursuing the art of discovery and towards engaging in the science of delivery. Employees are taught to seek efficiencies, leverage existing assets and distribution channels, and listen to (and appease) their best customers.

Mayer’s strategy for mobile is interesting: apparently she is going to bring in people who can build great apps through “acqui-hires.”

Also, Mayer seems bent on hiring more talent into the company, giving that talent resources, and then holding employees accountable.

Mayer, we’re told, emphasized making things faster at Yahoo.

Mayer did not speak much about specific products, like search, front page, Yahoo Finance, or Yahoo Sports, as had been predicted.

She did not talk about any future layoffs, opting to keep things “very positive.”

Here are the broad outlines of what she did say:

Mayer defined Yahoo. Paraphrasing, she told employees: “Yahoo, as a company, excels at personalization across content and ads.”
She emphasized user growth, ad sales, improving ad tools, and attracting better talent.
Mayer said that Yahoo will do more “acqui-hires,” where it buys small companies not for their products, but for their

Along with IQ, the bundles also include SAP Data Integrator for bringing information into the system. In both cases, customers get a runtime-only license, restricting IQ and Data Integrator’s use to the analytic applications in the bundle.

Overall, however, SAP has come up with “very attractive” pricing for the four editions, with a roughly 20% “uplift” for IQ and data integrator added to the base price of the analytics software. said Paul Clark, senior director of analytics marketing. Specific figures weren’t available.

IQ is typically licensed on a per-core basis, said Tom Traubitz, director of solution marketing. While the runtime license has no restrictions on data storage or the number of users, customers of the two lower-end packages are limited to 16 cores, while the two higher-end options include 32 cores, he said.

Groovy is a popular, open source, dynamic language residing on the Java Virtual Machine. Born in 2003, Groovy offers Java developers an almost-zero learning curve while gaining inspiration from Python, Ruby, and Smalltalk, according to its developers. Complementing it is the Grails open source Web application framework, which leverages Groovy.
…Groovy is one of the top five JVM scripting languages.

It has been confirmed by anonymous sources close to Google that the tech giant is working on iPhone/iPad Google Maps apps. This is likely a relief for many iOS users, who are anything but fond of Apple’s latest maps app.

Infor has certified some of its products for Red Hat’s Linux and JBoss middleware and added support for the MySQL and MariaDB databases, as part of a new push into open-source software, the companies announced Wednesday.

According to Oracle’s 2011 proxy statement, the billionaire had pledged 40 million shares as collateral. The increase reduced Ellison’s net worth estimate by $3.5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He’s now the world’s 8th- richest person with a $37.9 billion fortune. Collateralized shares aren’t counted toward an individual’s net worth, according to the ranking’s methodology.

IBM has made a series of important cloud computing announcements this year, including advancements to the IBM SmartCloud portfolio, through which IBM now manages more than a million enterprise application users and more than $100 billion of commerce transactions per year. In today’s announcement, IBM is broadening its cloud reach by extending its solutions and services on IBM SmartCloud and PureSystems to managed service providers (MSPs).

Microsoft is preparing to try something similar to this with its revamped Windows Server and System Center software, which connects to its own Windows Azure cloud, but has steered clear of hardware.

Amazon Web Services, meanwhile, has partnered with on-premise cloud specialist Eucalyptus and released its own ‘Storage Gateway’ software to make it easier for businesses to move data between their kit and its cloud but, again, has stayed away from hardware. Google, finally, has steered away from the on-premise world and its Google Compute Engine and Google App Engine services are a public-only play.

In fact, the only company that comes to mind as trying a similar thing is HP, which has been producing ‘CloudSystems’ for a couple of years. These pieces of storage and compute connect directly to HP’s OpenStack-based in-development public cloud, along with Amazon Web Services and Savvis.

NetSuite, Nelson told us, is focused on running big business. ERP is still its core offering, but more than 70% of its customers also run some other aspect of its suite (e-commerce, salesforce automation, and so forth). That may not be the sexiest message in an era where Oracle, SAP, and Salesforce.com are diving into fancy arenas like human capital management, social enterprise, and marketing, but ERP also happens to be the backbone of most businesses. NetSuite continues to bet it can dominate there.

Looking to give even more developers access to its core development tools, Oracle announced the release of a free version of its Oracle Application Development Framework: Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) Essentials.

Oracle ADF Essentials enables the global developer community to leverage the core capabilities of Oracle Application Development Framework free of cost. Previously, developers had to have a license for Oracle WebLogic to use ADF.

However, Oracle ADF Essentials is standards-based and deploys on GlassFish Server Open Source Edition, giving developers the ability to adopt and extend Oracle ADF functionality to new environments.

Ellison cited specifically that Oracle will be adding Infrastructure-as-a-Service so that Oracle Cloud will be comprised of “all three tiers of cloud computing — software as a service, platform as a service, and infrastructure as a service.”
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But the cloud won’t be the only big focus at the annual expo. Hardware is the backbone of Oracle, and databases will still be front and center.

Salesforce has improved its dashboards and reports, making them easier to create and simpler to navigate. It has hired expertise from other business intelligence companies to energize its efforts. The company’s Summer ’12 release included key technical advancement in joining reports, filters and bucketing data for analysis and presentation. It included calculated columns, which let users create new derived metrics more easily than they could if they had to work with a database analyst. What Salesforce outlined for the future, some of which it says will be available in the Winter ’13 release, is more filtering and sorting on aggregates. Users will be able to lay out charts in a dashboard from built reports and create combination charts with line over bar charts or specifically laid-out matrix reports. It also is planning to provide trending analytics through storing the changed data but only plans to store for up to one year. Salesforce was proud to provide shared folders across devices

Informatica provides an on-premises and on-demand environment for data integration and has continued to advance its cloud computing offering as a platform for supporting a range of applications and data needs. Informatica also this month announced a new software offering to help with data integrity by ensuring that consistent data is placed in the cloud computing environment. It leverages a master data management approach, which our research finds is growing rapidly, as 29 percent of organizations have initiated new projects and 26 percent have them in planning. The software also helps consolidate instances of Salesforce and provides the ability to augment existing data with offerings from Salesforce’s Data.com and other sources, such as IMS, Moody’s and Thomson Reuters.

This year’s Dreamforce consisted of three morals. The first, a social business is a profitable business. The second, the sin of ignoring mobile will not go unpunished. Third, for business, the cloud is an irreversible covenant.

Oracle must now chase Salesforce as Salesforce once had to chase Oracle. In the coming years the winner in enterprise social marketing may be the winner who takes all–or at least the larger market share.

Unlike Vertica, the consensus here is that Autonomy was an expensive deal that hasn’t come close to meeting expectations yet. What do you see happening there?

We just had a two-day planning meeting with everyone from Autonomy, where we went through the current status and looked at where we’re heading. The key for us right now is to get fiscal year 2013 on track, and that starts Nov. 1, so we’re working on that right now. Basically, when you look at Autonomy, the core unit is the IDOL Engine, which is the unique capability of meaning-based computing. We’re going to double down on that. In our labs in Cambridge, England, we have 40 or 50 mathematicians writing algorithms. And we’re going to build a team here in the U.S. to productize it and create a platform around it, because it has that potential. Frankly, the way Autonomy was managed previously, they put a lot more emphasis into enabling applications, which was fine, but our belief is that there’s a broad agenda, which is creating a

Regarding salesforce.com, the company has become a social business steamroller, pushing forward with determination. So far, the strategy has achieved rapid growth and delivered large enterprise customers.

Customization and personalization seem to be two key themes emerging from Burberry as of late, particularly with Burberry Bespoke and the RFID/custom content experience you’re using in the store. Is that fair to say? What’s driving that?

When you start interacting and engaging in a very authentic way with social media, you also have to look at the way you do things. Things need to be quicker, more personalized; there needs to be a dialogue, rather than the industry standard of working always in this way and on this calendar. You need to question everything that you can. We did this show yesterday; you can literally buy all the outerwear off the runway immediately, deliver in six to eight weeks, that sort of thing.

As for RFID: People are interested in what goes behind products now. You can show so much more on the web through video and text and moving imagery. So what we wanted to do, for example, is if I try on a trench coat and approach one of the mirrors that we’ve enabled with RF

It’s easy to see why Benioff sees a big opportunity in marketing. Marketers don’t really have an IT system of record currently. Instead, they’ve been making do with many point systems or, worse, spreadsheets. A next step for Salesforce would be to do more to support e-commerce, an area that direct competitor NetSuite has entered. Commerce is also a big deal for both IBM and Oracle with their personalization, commerce-engine, and retail technologies. So the race is on to build a more comprehensive (and lucrative) marketing and e-commerce cloud.

In the area of talent management, Work.com expands on the December 2011 Ryyple acquisition with new employee promotion, rating, ranking, and analytics capabilities. But Work.com does not yet handle recruiting, succession planning, onboarding, or e-learning. Benioff and Work.com executives were evasive about future plans, saying only that they’re “not done yet.” Partners like Jobscience and Cyber U build apps for recruiting and e-learning, respec

Mayer is planning on doubling down on search, as well as advertising platforms. Expect more money spent in both places, as well as a redo of Yahoo’s long-rocky search partnership with Microsoft.

Also up for a refresh is both email and also the critically important Yahoo home page. Both are being redesigned substantially to focus on consumer experience. People who have seen the mock-ups describe them both as more social and as more of a dashboard approach for users than the traditional catch-all portal.

Everything as a Service. Behind the scenes, SAP has been rearchitecting its SaaS offerings to be delivered as web services. For example, it has broken up ByD functionality into 32 “honeycombs,” so that no two of them share a common database. Rather they communicate via messaging. SAP has taken the same approach with its line-of-business applications. In fact, all of SAP cloud applications will be deployed as web services, including its mobility and database offerings. I have to believe this also includes SuccessFactors. SAP will now be able to sell individual modules (e.g. Finance), or a complete suite, or combinations in between.

Platform-as-a-Service. SAP has built a PaaS capability, now referred to as the SAP Netweaver Cloud (earlier code-names included JPass, Neo, and Project River.) It is intended as a multi-language/multi-framework platform. It is primarily a Java-platform, but its open nature also allow

Percolator, a system for incrementally processing updates to a large data set, and deployed it to create the Google web search index. By replacing a batch-based indexing system with an indexing system based on incremental processing using Percolator, we process the same number of documents per day, while reducing the average age of documents in Google search results by 50%.

In order to achieve that, we have created scalable infrastructure, named Pregel, to mine a wide range of graphs. In Pregel, programs are expressed as a sequence of iterations. In each iteration, a vertex can, independently of other vertices, receive messages sent to it in the previous iteration, send messages to other vertices, modify its own and its outgoing edges’ states, and mutate the graph’s topology (experts in parallel processing will recognize that the Bulk Synchronous Parallel Model inspired Pregel).

The fundamental idea of MRv2 is to split up the two major functionalities of the JobTracker, resource management and job scheduling/monitoring, into separate daemons. The idea is to have a global ResourceManager (RM) and per-application ApplicationMaster (AM). An application is either a single job in the classical sense of Map-Reduce jobs or a DAG of jobs.

The ResourceManager and per-node slave, the NodeManager (NM), form the data-computation framework. The ResourceManager is the ultimate authority that arbitrates resources among all the applications in the system.

The per-application ApplicationMaster is, in effect, a framework specific library and is tasked with negotiating resources from the ResourceManager and working with the NodeManager(s) to execute and monitor the tasks.

Dremel is a scalable, interactive ad-hoc query system for analysis of read-only nested data. By combining multi-level execution trees and columnar data layout, it is capable of running aggregation queries over trillion-row tables in seconds. The system scales to thousands of CPUs and petabytes of data, and has thousands of users at Google. In this paper, we describe the architecture and implementation of Dremel, and explain how it complements MapReduce-based computing. We present a novel columnar storage representation for nested records and discuss experiments on few-thousand node instances of the system.

After years of cost-cutting, dictatorial IT control of technology investments, and little technological advancements, investment in innovation in the enterprise is back. As business leaders take charge of their destiny, they seek new business models empowered by new technologies. This shift reflects not only the consumerization of IT, but also the shifts to an engagement strategy. Dreamforce X demonstrated that this was more than a fad. High profile customer case studies reinforce how enterprises can change the game. Dreamforce has emerged as the place for enterprise thought leadership.

However, organizations should not be naive about the change management issues required for success. Adoption has always rested with the people. Organizations require time and repetition to reinforce transformational principles. In addition, technology governance is required to avoid issues with SaaS/Cloud best of breed hell when line of business leaders rapidly and randomly deploy solutions w

If you only read the headlines, you’d think Oracle’s recent quarterly results were a disappointment. Hardware sales were down, Oracle missed analyst estimates, and all the usual jazz. But as it happens, the analysts spewing that noise got it all wrong: Oracle nailed its fiscal Q1 results and did it in more ways than one.

Salesforce.com is tying its Marketing Cloud into Facebook’s new custom audience targeting functionality, which will help “marketers reach people they may already have a connection with on Facebook,” according to a Salesforce.com blog post.

First, a user would pick groups of customers from within their Salesforce.com CRM (customer relationship management) system, such as existing customers or prospects, the post states. A list of emails or phone numbers culled from the groups would then be run through a hashing process for security purposes, and compared with information of active Facebook users in order to find matches.

“One of the people who manages our corporate twitter account thought he was tweeting from their personal twitter account on Saturday morning but tweeted from our corporate account by mistake,” Microsoft spokeswoman Christina Pearson said. “That person immediately realized his mistake and deleted the tweet from our corporate account. We have taken steps to help ensure that this kind of mistake doesn’t happen again.”

Salesforce’s Identity service is a federated identity management system. It’s capable of not simply contacting different identity management systems but uploading their contents on individuals into a single, central identity system. “We don’t just use other directories. We build a new, central identity management directory,” said Andrew Leigh, director of Salesforce Platform, in an interview following Harris’ keynote. The Identity service imports identities from any LDAP directory, Microsoft Active Directory, or any other standards-based directory service and then serves as a central clearinghouse for a broad set of applications, he said.

The pay, disclosed in a corporate filing, was up 24 percent from the previous year’s total of $77.6 million. Most of Ellison’s pay came from stock options that were valued at $90.7 million when they were granted in June 2011.

Oracle says the disclosure is no longer relevant and will no longer be provided since the company increasingly bundles its software products as part of “cloud services.” That may be, but the new opacity also makes it harder to judge the health of Oracle’s individual businesses. Each of those is under attack from rivals offering equivalent or better technology at lower cost, argues analyst Peter Goldmacher of Cowen & Co.

Besides, it wasn’t a great quarter for Oracle. Revenue was short of expectations, falling 2% from the prior-year period. That was mostly due to the continued rapid decline of Oracle’s hardware business, which fell 24%.

The Service Cloud is getting more and more powerful with lot more focus on making it broad based and feature rich.It’s now clear that Service Cloud’s social and mobile focus will certainly position it to capitalize on a large market opportunity and develop into a $B business.

Benioff is prepared. Benioff facilitated the 2.5 hour keynote with no notes. He interviewed partners, talked about the content on the slides, and walked the audience without pulling notes from his pocket. He could see the slides on screens strategically placed in the auditorium, but the slides were heavy on images and light on text, so they provided little guidance. He clearly had the content internalized. Benioff also knew where people were sitting in the audience and called upon those people in an interview-style conversation. He talked to the CIO of General Electric, the CEO of Virgin America, and even motivational guru Tony Robbins as part of his keynote.

Parker Harris is one of the cofounders of Salesforce, which has 90,000 people at its Dreamforce event this week. Here he talks with me about the future of Salesforce. Why does he know about that? A lot. He’s vice president of technology at Salesforce.

Amex has launched its Link-Like-Love social commerce program, a next-generation rewards program integrated with Facebook for Amex card holders and that offers personalized rewards based on Facebook Likes and check-ins.

SAP (under Sameer’s leadership) seems to have cracked the code to build the social infrastructure for a collaborative enterprise. We had a good discussions and he showed me plans and early screens for a model of Social that is not just focused on the social aspects, but more in the collaboration that comes from the channels. I saw how a customer can collaborate with an employee to speed up a sales process, how an internal process can be improved by collecting customer feedback, and how the flow of information to and from customers and employees can be placed into the SAP components. In other words, I saw how the collaborative enterprise begins to take shape. Yes, many more use cases and examples are necessary – but they are not building use cases – they are building infrastructure. The rest requires customer ingenuity to work.

Oracle’s overall hardware business was off 24 percent year over year despite “triple-digit growth” in engineered systems like Exadata.

Oracle’s plan to wring software-like profit from its hardware business still hasn’t panned out nearly three years after it bought Sun Microsystems’ server-and-storage business for $7.4 billion. And that’s got to bug CEO Larry Ellison who is a bear on execution and profitability.

SAP’s progress on all these fronts is limited to date, though the company is moving forward on all but number three as far as I can tell. But, when compared to Microsoft Azure, SAP is still significantly behind. Of course, Azure itself is significantly behind as well – which really means that the entire market is still building out this vision, and no one, including a market-leader like Microsoft, has completely nailed it yet.

SAP’s biggest hole for now is on the developer side, and here’s where SAP’s potentially greatest strength is right now a major weakness. The cloud opportunity that SAP presents really encompasses all three of its major focus areas – mobile, in-memory analytics, and business process innovation. In an ideal world a great cloud app would be mobile, use HANA when and if necessary, and reuse SAP’s large base of business objects and processes, if not connecting directly to the Business Suite or ByD itself.

[Not a lot to agree with in this article… -DBM]
The latest offerings include new features for Chatter, its social networking service, as well as an identity management application that allows users to access all their cloud and on-premise applications in a single swoop. Salesforce also introduced a platform that could replace collaboration portals and file sharing applications such as Box. They represent an almost desperate attempt to engage customers in multiple ways, hoping something “sticks,” in the words of Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer. Constellation Research principal analyst Ray Wang says the rash of preannouncements this week is “a way to grab mindshare first” to counter increased competition among the vendors.

The big picture to Walravens is that Oracle’s love affair with hardware diverted the company’s focus from cloud computing. “Oracle is late to the cloud computing trend but attempting to catch up with its recent acquisitions and by virtualizing its Fusion applications in the Oracle Public Cloud. Overall, we think Oracle would have been better off focusing more intensely on cloud computing early – and we feel the Sun acquisition and engineered systems effort detracted from that focus,” said Walravens.

With that backdrop it’s likely that you’ll see a shift in Oracle’s focus to the cloud and from hardware, which has dominated the last few Open World conferences.

Building a solution to a problem of moderate or lukewarm interest to users is a long-term death sentence for startups, where founders will almost certainly commit to 20,000 hours of their lives(or 5 years of 80-hour workweeks) in order to “beat the odds” and deliver a breakout success: a sustainable, scalable, profitable business.

Why, then, are so many founders so reluctant to invest even 500 or 1,000 hours upfront to be sure that, when they’re done, the business they’re building will face genuine, substantial demand or enthusiasm. Without passionate customers, even the most passionate entrepreneur will flounder at best. Dropbox is a great example. It scaled like lightning by solving an urgent, painful problem for millions of consumers. The product is so good, helpful, and easy to use that it literally almost does its own marketing organically through the product’s viral nature, just as Hotmail and Gmail have done since inception.

You’re sure to discover new ways to optimize your systems, new solutions that will help you take your business to the next level, and new practices that will make you more successful in your job and in your industry. Oracle OpenWorld 2012. September 30 – October 4, 2012.

APEX doesn’t infringe on the patents in the suit and, moreover, they are invalid, according to Oracle.

The vendor is asking for a declaratory judgment exonerating itself and the customers targeted by ADI’s suit, as well as a declaration that the patents are not valid.

ADI is registered as a limited liability corporation headquartered in Round Rock, Texas. Its listed manager is Brent Farney, who records show is associated with a number of other LLCs headquartered at the same address.

In recent years, there has been an uptick in patent lawsuits filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, which is seen as friendly to plaintiffs in such cases.

Oracle believes that ADI was created for the sole purpose of pursuing the lawsuit, according to its complaint. Such organizations are commonly referred to by the pejorative “patent trolls.”

The service will provide customers with access to secure, virtualised compute power hosted in an Oracle data centre, Ellison said. Oracle will also sell software for customers to build “identical services” in their own data centers, allowing them to move workloads back and forth between the public and private clouds, he said.

After the bell, shares of Oracle Corp (ORCL.O) slipped 0.53 percent to $32.09 after the company reported that quarterly hardware sales tumbled 24 percent from a year earlier as the technology giant continued its struggle to turn around the computer division it acquired with its purchase of Sun Microsystems. In regular trading, Oracle closed at $32.26, down 1.6 percent on Nasdaq.

Navfree is a free GPS app, and it’s sitting proudly at the top of the Navigation category in the Apple App Store. Using crowd-sourced data, the app displays maps that are automatically stored on your Idevice so there’s no need for a constant data connection. While it’s not as cute and charming as Waze, it’s a good alternative to Google Maps for those looking for an easy to use, reliable GPS app.

Simply fire up the Safari web browser, head over to maps.google.com, click the Share button at the bottom and then tap “add to the home screen”. This will add a shortcut to your home screen pointing to Google Maps, which throughout our hands-on testing has already proven much more helpful than Apple Maps.

Either that, or use one of the other mapping applications available in the Itunes Store. Waze, for example, is an excellent alternative to Apple Maps, offering a colourful, social way to get directions. Check out our guide on how to get around Apple’s Google ban in IOS 6.

This might not be necessary for much longer, as Google has hinted to The INQUIRER that it will be bringing a Google Maps application to IOS 6 soon.

The committee memo, released for a hearing today in Washington, said Microsoft used transactions with subsidiaries in Puerto Rico, Ireland, Singapore and Bermuda to save at least $6.5 billion in taxes. The committee also revealed that Hewlett- Packard Co. (HP) has used a series of short-term internal loans that allowed the company to tap its offshore cash for domestic operations without paying taxes, according to the memo.

Judge Dr. Guntz explained that “the Android operating system” infringes the invention protected by claim 23 of EP1040406 on a “soft input panel system and method”. Microsoft is also asserting the U.S. equivalent of this patent against Motorola in the Western District of Washington.

Sales for the period, which ended in August, decreased 2.3 percent to $8.18 billion, and profit excluding some items was 53 cents per share, the Redwood City company said Thursday. Analysts on average had estimated earnings of 53 cents a share on revenue of $8.42 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Net income rose 11 percent to $2.03 billion (41 cents per share) from $1.84 billion (36 cents) a year earlier.

Oracle’s acquisitions this year of RightNow Technologies Inc. and Taleo Corp. – which sell customer service and human resources software delivered as an Internet service – boosted applications sales during the seasonally slow first quarter, but that wasn’t enough to counter slumping revenue for its computer hardware.

“We’re pleased this decision builds on previous rulings in Germany that have already found Motorola is broadly infringing Microsoft’s intellectual property,” David Howard, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel at Microsoft, said in a statement. “We will continue to enforce injunctions against Motorola products in Germany and hope Motorola will join other Android device makers by taking a license to Microsoft’s patented inventions.”

Enterprise for Java customers can now choose between OpenJDK versions 6, 7, or 8.

In addition, Enterprise for Java throws in an Apache Tomcat 7 web application container, a Memcache store for managing distributed session state, and a Heroku PostgreSQL production database instance. All come pre-configured and pre-integrated, and the full stack can be deployed with one click.

You prefer JBoss over Tomcat? Your apps are coded for MySQL instead of PostgreSQL? Too bad. Heroku might support multiple languages, but in other respects its approach has always been to provide a complete, consistent set of tools to make deploying apps fast and easy. Choice doesn’t figure into it.

On the plus side, while Heroku’s Java support originally required developers to compile and deploy their apps using the Maven build tool, the Enterprise product now supports uploading Java apps as .WAR files – a biggie for businesses that want to migrate existing code.

With the introduction of Java support, we are seeing growing interest from larger enterprises who are often heavy Java users and who are looking for a platform like Heroku to increase the speed of application delivery.

Today, we are announcing Heroku Enterprise for Java, a new product that makes it simpler than ever for enterprise developers to create, deploy and manage Java web applications using their preferred tools and processes. The product is priced at a monthly subscription fee per production application making it easy for the business to align investment with value.

Based on the overwhelmingly positive feedback from checks at [cloud-computing industry event] Dreamforce sustained market momentum and expanding market opportunity, we are increasing our price target to $185. By leveraging social technologies and being first to market, Salesforce (ticker: CRM) has created a competitive advantage that we believe will translate to significantly above-average growth rates (25% to 30%-plus over the next several years) and market-share gains, which should power significant upside to revenue, margin and cash flow over time.

The workgroup, using Tizen as its reference distribution, will create an Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) reference platform, which the car industry can use for automotive systems including in-vehicle entertainment, digital dashboards, climate control and intelligent roadway instrumentation.

Safra Catz, Oracle’s co-president, said on a conference call the company’s results as reported “partially mask the underlying strength of our business.” She noted that Oracle’s numbers were skewed by the strengthening dollar and said, in constant-currency terms, sales would have increased 3%.

But that explanation didn’t wash for some analysts, who fault Oracle’s sluggish hardware business and argue that Oracle has lagged others in software and services that are accessed over the Internet, as opposed to the programs Oracle has traditionally sold that are installed and run on-site by businesses.

“The world is moving to the cloud and Oracle is not completely in synch with that,” said Mark Murphy, an analyst at Piper Jaffray.

Benioff said that the theme of Dreamforce 2012 has been to tell stories about how Salesforce customers have used enterprise social media to grow their businesses as a way to educate the broader enterprise market that is still learning about how to use this technology.

The workgroup, using Tizen as its reference distribution, will create an Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) reference platform, which the car industry can use for automotive systems including in-vehicle entertainment, digital dashboards, climate control and intelligent roadway instrumentation.

Sales for the period, which ended in August, decreased 2.3 percent to $8.18 billion, and profit excluding some items was 53 cents per share, the Redwood City company said Thursday. Analysts on average had estimated earnings of 53 cents a share on revenue of $8.42 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Net income rose 11 percent to $2.03 billion (41 cents per share) from $1.84 billion (36 cents) a year earlier.

Oracle’s acquisitions this year of RightNow Technologies Inc. and Taleo Corp. – which sell customer service and human resources software delivered as an Internet service – boosted applications sales during the seasonally slow first quarter, but that wasn’t enough to counter slumping revenue for its computer hardware.

Judge Dr. Guntz explained that “the Android operating system” infringes the invention protected by claim 23 of EP1040406 on a “soft input panel system and method”. Microsoft is also asserting the U.S. equivalent of this patent against Motorola in the Western District of Washington.

“We’re pleased this decision builds on previous rulings in Germany that have already found Motorola is broadly infringing Microsoft’s intellectual property,” David Howard, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel at Microsoft, said in a statement. “We will continue to enforce injunctions against Motorola products in Germany and hope Motorola will join other Android device makers by taking a license to Microsoft’s patented inventions.”

The committee memo, released for a hearing today in Washington, said Microsoft used transactions with subsidiaries in Puerto Rico, Ireland, Singapore and Bermuda to save at least $6.5 billion in taxes. The committee also revealed that Hewlett- Packard Co. (HP) has used a series of short-term internal loans that allowed the company to tap its offshore cash for domestic operations without paying taxes, according to the memo.

With the introduction of Java support, we are seeing growing interest from larger enterprises who are often heavy Java users and who are looking for a platform like Heroku to increase the speed of application delivery.

Today, we are announcing Heroku Enterprise for Java, a new product that makes it simpler than ever for enterprise developers to create, deploy and manage Java web applications using their preferred tools and processes. The product is priced at a monthly subscription fee per production application making it easy for the business to align investment with value.

Based on the overwhelmingly positive feedback from checks at [cloud-computing industry event] Dreamforce sustained market momentum and expanding market opportunity, we are increasing our price target to $185. By leveraging social technologies and being first to market, Salesforce (ticker: CRM) has created a competitive advantage that we believe will translate to significantly above-average growth rates (25% to 30%-plus over the next several years) and market-share gains, which should power significant upside to revenue, margin and cash flow over time.

Enterprise for Java customers can now choose between OpenJDK versions 6, 7, or 8.

In addition, Enterprise for Java throws in an Apache Tomcat 7 web application container, a Memcache store for managing distributed session state, and a Heroku PostgreSQL production database instance. All come pre-configured and pre-integrated, and the full stack can be deployed with one click.

You prefer JBoss over Tomcat? Your apps are coded for MySQL instead of PostgreSQL? Too bad. Heroku might support multiple languages, but in other respects its approach has always been to provide a complete, consistent set of tools to make deploying apps fast and easy. Choice doesn’t figure into it.

On the plus side, while Heroku’s Java support originally required developers to compile and deploy their apps using the Maven build tool, the Enterprise product now supports uploading Java apps as .WAR files – a biggie for businesses that want to migrate existing code.

Safra Catz, Oracle’s co-president, said on a conference call the company’s results as reported “partially mask the underlying strength of our business.” She noted that Oracle’s numbers were skewed by the strengthening dollar and said, in constant-currency terms, sales would have increased 3%.

But that explanation didn’t wash for some analysts, who fault Oracle’s sluggish hardware business and argue that Oracle has lagged others in software and services that are accessed over the Internet, as opposed to the programs Oracle has traditionally sold that are installed and run on-site by businesses.

“The world is moving to the cloud and Oracle is not completely in synch with that,” said Mark Murphy, an analyst at Piper Jaffray.

Benioff said that the theme of Dreamforce 2012 has been to tell stories about how Salesforce customers have used enterprise social media to grow their businesses as a way to educate the broader enterprise market that is still learning about how to use this technology.

The software said that what does matter in a good call-center worker—one who won’t quit before the company recoups its $5,000 investment in training—is personality. Data show that creative types tend to stick around for the necessary six months. Inquisitive people often don’t.

[Mad Money appearance -DBM]
well, today we introduced the salesforce marketing cloud. and the reason why that’s important, jim, is that by 2017, chief marketing officers are going to spend more on technology than cios. and now we’re giving them a cockpit so they can fly their fighter, their marketing fighter, if you will, into this incredible new marketing cloud.

Saleforce launched a new version of the service that revamps the old pricing model and beefs up tools for building applications with the Java programming language, all with large enterprise customers in mind.

Hu is right; this is a new world. It’s now a more open and social system. Companies that choose to maintain their command and control leadership models and don’t adapt to new market realities are going to be wiped out. More than ever, organizations need to adopt social and mobile technologies along with new leadership models, to build strong connections with their customers and stay ahead of the competition.

“Poised to reap the benefits from investments in Fusion Apps, engineered systems, and sales capacity, we expect Oracle’s momentum to sustain” through the current fiscal year, wrote Adam Holt of Morgan Stanley in a report on Tuesday.

Software as a service (SaaS) ERP software, cloud computing, implementation accelerators, and other tools are constantly emerging, offering the long-awaited allure of simplified ERP initiatives. Hype suggests that these tools will soon make traditional, on-premise ERP systems obsolete, at least as we know them know.

The balance this time definitely is in favour of REST.
So it seems like REST will be the new SOAP – meaning that today’s Enterprises that have any form of Service Oriented Architecture will replace their current implementations by those fit for the future

That would mean, to a good extent, replacing XML by JSON, and SOAP RPC by HTTP’s CRUD: PUT, GET, POST and DELETE
…
Anyway, the future is now, and here: JSON and REST. No more bloated XML that takes up Gigabytes of memory just to parse a 1 MB XML message, no more “500 kilobytes of tags, 4 kilobytes of content” complaints (yes that is implementation, but some if not most of that comes along with adoption), no more.
JSON is here, a slim, lean and mean way to construct a message, and even better, it gets automatically parsed by Java

CEO Marc @Benioff already revealed during his TechCrunch Disrupt fireside chat that the company is adding Box/Dropbox style file sharing system called ChatterBox. Now I’m hearing from multiple sources that Chatter will also be getting secure cross-company instant messaging.

Chatter already has an instant messaging feature, but it only works with people within your company. If you have suppliers or partners you need to chat with you’ll need an external application. The idea to enable companies to collaborate with people outside its own corporate firewall, and it’s something Salesforce.com has been talking about since instant messaging was announced in May.

Hardly surprising when we realize that last time Oracle brought truly great innovation to the IT market was THIRTY YEARS AGO with the modern relational database.
Since then Oracle has either copied its competitors (e.g. Apps -SAP, Fusion -SAP/Workday) or bought and killed them (e.g. PeopleSoft, Siebel, Hyperion etc.)

That could prove a tough act to follow for Oracle OpenWorld, generally the city’s most popular tech event each year. In 2011, the two business software conferences ran neck and neck in terms of attendees, with OpenWorld drawing about 45,000 people.

[Not the deal you were expecting. -DBM]
The agreement deals with Microsoft’s exFAT (Extended File Allocation Table) technology, which is a file system the company developed particularly for flash drives. Microsoft also licenses the technology to companies such as Sharp and Sony.

Having use of the technology could help RIM add more multimedia capability to its phones, which consumers will welcome. Whether it would help RIM do anything more than keep up with the competition in the smartphone space remains to be seen.

Marketing Cloud is about taking technology and turning that into a targeted social tied together with customer data and CRM systems.

“You’re going to be able to create social profiles unlike anything any company has seen in the past,” St. Ledger promised

Although St. Ledger said it is technically launching officially today, it’s already been in the works for awhile as it is based off of Salesforce acquisitions Radian6 and Buddy Media, which brought along a notable customer list that includes Disney, HP and Proctor & Gamble, among many other top global businesses.

[I wonder if he knows the definition of simplistic – quote below correct whether he does or not -DBM]
“It’s really very simplistic. If you aren’t taking advantage of the data you are collecting and being kept in your business, then you just have a pile of a lot of data,” Parikh said. “We are getting more and more interested in doing things with the data we are collecting.”

The next step for the platform is AppExchange Checkout, a new channel with turn-key billing for “lightweight apps” that are supposed to be faster and solve targeted business problems.

Seka briefly offered a snapshot of the AppExchange roadmap through next summer. Details were few and far between, but Chatter will be added to AppExchange next spring along with security review automation and a new feature called AppExchange Answers. Site.com apps and “streamline publishing” will also be debuting next summer.

The services offered under the partnership are divided up into the following four verticals: deployment, cloud architecture, software integration and social media.

For example, on deployment, Dell-Salesforce customer service reps will be responsible for managing production support while working with Dell business customers of any size, finding the strategy that works best for them.

Spanner is Google’s scalable, multi-version, globallydistributed,
and synchronously-replicated database. It is
the first system to distribute data at global scale and support
externally-consistent distributed transactions. This
paper describes how Spanner is structured, its feature set,
the rationale underlying various design decisions, and a
novel time API that exposes clock uncertainty. This API
and its implementation are critical to supporting external
consistency and a variety of powerful features: nonblocking
reads in the past, lock-free read-only transactions,
and atomic schema changes, across all of Spanner.

In simple terms, Google has managed to design an information store that spans its fleet of datacentres around the world and lets applications read (and, to a lesser extent write) data without being crushed by huge latencies. Software using the system can replicate data across countries and continents, while having extremely fast read times.

“Our pipeline for the next three to four quarters looks very good,” he said. Mainly due to innovations in trendy cloud technology and super-fast data analysis, SAP has the “best prerequisites” to “operate well in any environment,” he added. Cloud technology allows users to store data on the internet rather than on hardware equipment and are attractive for companies, because they are cheaper and simpler to maintain.

SAP has more than enough reasons to be optimistic. The company’s cloud technologies, mobile apps and super-fast data analysis, known as HANA, are all growing markets. Mobile apps, which make it possible to work on data from a mobile phone or tablet, are expected to expand considerably due to the trend in tablet and smartphone sales.

In addition to keynotes, breakout sessions, and product launches at the 2011 conference at the San Francisco Design Centre, an interactive installation called Connections brought Facebook to life on the show floor. Developed by creative technology agency Obscura Digital, the augmented-reality space created a physical version of Facebook. “Facebook wanted to show that their services are not just about connecting the people behind a screen, be that a computer or mobile phone,” said James Hurlbut, interactive developer at Obscura Digital.

“[They wanted] to show how you can use the services in a physical setting without any screens or keyboards.” A team of Obscura developers worked with Facebook art director, Ben Barry, to create the Connections activation.

“While some vendors engage in a battle of words over the number of people who attend their events, SAP’s focus has been on attendee experience and highly-engaging content,” said R. “Ray” Wang, principal analyst and CEO, Constellation Research. “The award shows the approach is working.”

To add to this strategy, the tech giant sought to build a fully integrated social media program for the October run of its Information on Demand event at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. With the help of business communications company Drury Design Dynamics, the initiative was also designed to leverage the participation of on-site conference attendees to engage those in the virtual realm.

Central to the plan was the use of “social concierges” to provide information on the various activities and teach late adopters of social networks how to use the platforms. These staffers roamed the show floor equipped with iPads and took daily polls, gathering answers to questions such as “What’s your organization’s top business objective?” and recording observations on video.

Introduced in April, the free, Web-based platform for the virtual version of the conference offers a constant stream of content—broadcasts of keynote speakers or a live “ask an expert” session, as well as downloadable PDFs.

What this meant was introducing activities based around the idea of gamification—that is, the concept of pursuing goals and anticipated rewards, much like how video games and sports function. It did present a risk for the planning team, as gaming strategies are something typically used by brands in the consumer space rather than in the business-to-business context. Also, Dell World’s attendees—an audience capped at 2,000—included C.I.O.s and I.T. professionals from some of the largest corporations, not, as some gamification efforts focus on, teenagers on Facebook.

SAP AG may have discovered the next step in hybrid event design: transitioning to an “always on” strategy that keeps content from an event available and relevant long after the physical gathering. The German software company has already established itself as a leader in the hybrid event space with innovative delivery of its Sapphire Now conference in Orlando to customers and partners worldwide. Now it is using sapphirenow.com as a permanent resource to share content produced from past events and information about future conferences.

“We don’t have virtual events,” said SAP’s vice president of global events, Scott Schenker. “We have an online platform for the event content and the experiences themselves. The online platform is meant to be of value every single day. We recognize with the content we have available, a connected event can happen at any time. Sapphire Now as a single destination for 72 hours is the old model. The new model is that Sapphire Now is always up.”

In addition to working with like-minded partners, part of Oracle’s success is its meticulous record-keeping, published in annual post-event sustainability reports. The numbers are impressive: Organizers reduced paper use from 112 tons in 2007 to six this year, cut carbon emissions from ground transportation by 26 metric tons since 2007, and diverted 503 metric tons of waste from landfill since 2008.

Now, thanks to a $1.5 million grant from the Salesforce.com Foundation, the public clinic will be the site of a two-year pilot project where up to 1,100 uninsured children can get coordinated physical and mental health treatment to address ailments that have been interfering with them succeeding in school.

The donation to the San Francisco General Hospital Foundation and Southeast Health Center is just part of $10 million in grants the cloud software computing giant’s foundation will announce Monday in a coordinated effort to help transform San Francisco’s troubled southeastern neighborhoods.

The A6′s score also puts it ahead of Android device benchmarks. For example, the Samsung Galaxy S III with a Samsung Exynos 4412 quad-core chip rated at 1.4GHz posted a score of 1588, compared to the A6′s 1,601.

The consensus seems to be that as a result of the Affordable Care Act, fewer people will be covered under employer-based health care plans. Is that correct? And what do individuals most need to know about the effects of health care reform?

About 80% of our consumers today are covered through employer benefits. As a result of the ACA, coverage will be available to more consumers, and employers are going to look at how they manage their costs and whether it’s more effective for their employees to purchase insurance with the subsidies on the exchanges. We do believe that over time — not early on, but over time — there will be a transition from employer-based coverage to more consumers as purchasers. So we have a lot of focus on the consumer experience because today consumers are not really engaged in making decisions about quality, affordable health care.

The Nexus 7 felt to me like the faster and more powerful device, and it was better for running complex video games and quickly jumping around from app to app. You may also want to wait since Apple has been rumored to be making its own low-end tablet that could come out in time for the holidays.

According to Andy Rubin of Google the company stepped in not to stop this fork of Android but to stop Acer from violating the agreement it entered when it joined the Open Handset Alliance (OHA). That is an alliance of OEMs who joined up early in the life of Android to promote the use of the platform for the good of all. Rubin states that the members of the OHA agreed to not use forks of Android incompatible with the ecosystem, and that Aliyun definitely fits that description.

Consider these panel topics: “Education + Technology: But Where’s the Revolution?”; “How Enterprise Got Sexy”; “Disrupting Yesterday’s Disruptors: Paving the Way for the Millennials,” the latter featuring a host of young entrepreneurs working in several decidedly non-social businesses.

But the vast majority of SAP customers might take a conservative stance on changing their database for a production ECC or CRM instance.

As I and many others have pointed out before – just by porting ECC from some database to HANA, things won’t get incredibly fast by default. The reason is that most of the bottleneck is in the ABAP layer. Unless all that code is rewritten, the schemas simplified and so on – it is difficult to imagine ECC consistently getting a huge boost from Hana. I am sure SAP will probably rewrite some code to make use of HANA, at least for long running batch jobs. But even in that case – the best case I can see is most customers using it as a secondary database for accelerating some parts of ECC at best. Add to this the efforts of all the other DB vendors to attack HANA to protect their turf. So all things considered, running ECC etc on HANA is at best a technical triumph, but not a sure shot commercial success in itself.

Enterprise Software veteran, with over twenty years' experience on every side of of business, from user and buyer to VP, CEO and Board Member roles; from Procter & Gamble to Oracle, SAP and OQO. Founder of the OracAlumni Network.
Aactively tracks the trends and strategies of the enterprise software world, shares his news digest and analysis at Next Gen Enterprise.